Descending the castled mountain, and taking the road toward the Hunter’s Lodge, the scenery becomes more and more wild; the habitations of men disappear, and pursuing your route some few hours, you find yourself at once transplanted to the most picturesque scenes of the Alleghanies. You are now in the Black Forest, one of the few spots in Europe where you behold primitive oaks, as yet undesecrated by the woodman’s axe, and land which has never been tilled by the ploughman. Here is a little miniature painting, beautifully set in diamond spires and emerald hills on the one side, and the pearly Rhine on the other. Some there are who think the setting more valuable than the picture; but diplomacy has a different opinion on the subject, and has always valued the Black Forest as one of the most important strategical positions of Germany.
There is no sea-bathing in Europe equal in natural grandeur to either Cape May, or Long Branch. The most frequented watering-place of that sort, on the Continent, is Ostende; but the Belgians are the most unpoetical, unamiable people of Europe. With more historic lore than almost any other modern people, their minds are as flat as their soil,[[3]] and their manners as unsociable as the Spanish hangman, Alba, could have made them. Their religion is petrified, their literature stale, and there is nothing of the ideal in them. It is in the bogs of Flanders where the home-sick Swiss mountaineer is most tempted to commit suicide. Ostende, independent of the beach, which does not compare to our own sea-shore, is extremely dreary. Nothing but sand, sand-hills, and morasses, surround it. It is true, these morasses have been cultivated by the extreme patience and industry of the Flemish peasant, but there is a monotony in their fields and parks, and even in their gardens, which can drive you mad. Every thing answers a useful purpose, but to the imagination it is a dreary waste.
Ostende, during the summer season, is nevertheless a picture of Europe in miniature. You can reach it from England in eight hours, from Brussels in six, from Paris in sixteen, from the Rhine (Cologne) in fifteen. Brighton, on the opposite side of the Channel, is nevertheless a paradise to it, if any thing can be called a paradise where, instead of the primitive manners of the first couple, you meet with the exclusive dampness of English society. But nature has blessed that little Island of Great Britain—the Japan of the European sea—with so many gifts, that the strange organization of its society appears to be less the offspring of that peculiar irony which runs through history, than a means of tempering “the envy of less happier lands,” and making them comparatively content with their fate. Every Continental watering-place is crowded with Englishmen, who come there to enjoy social freedom; those of England are nothing but epitomes of the concentric circles which mark the monotonous orbits of the different classes of English society. The elements do not mingle, form no harmonious groups, and have nothing cheering either for the imagination or the heart.
There is great danger that the society of our own watering-places is gradually copying the model, without having the same uniform, and on that account more endurable standard of division. The different coteries of a large city—the necessary consequence of the difference of refinement and education—need not necessarily conflict with each other; but they are intolerable in a small place, where the distinctions are constantly before your eyes, can hardly be kept up without rudeness. Fancy half a dozen coteries dining at the same table, meeting at least three times a day, and then spending the evening together in the same parlor. It must be a perfect little purgatory, from whose pains there is no respite, except by diving in the broad Atlantic.
| [1] | I purposely avoid the English dandyism “railway.” |
| [2] | Younger sons without fortune.—Remark of the Editors. |
| [3] | I, of course, except the people of Liege and the Ardennes, who are descended from the Gauls, and are only politically united with Flanders and Brabant. |